The Night of the Purification of Wizarding Britain
by half fare prince
Summary: Britain isn't what Harry thought, or Wizarding Europe thinks. He and his friends aren't the figureheads they'd hoped to be. And if they can't discover what's going on tonight, locked inside the Wizarding League's headquarters, they'll see the purification of Wizarding Britain tomorrow morning. Diverges from canon the morning after Voldemort's death.
1. Last Night: What Harry Just Missed

When it happened, Harry's ears were still popping from the aeroplane. Otherwise he'd have heard. He and the honorary British delegation had landed in Muggle Bern hours earlier and been whisked by silent cars with opaque windscreens through the center of the city and into a wizarding enclave, and they'd done all the arrival things since then—they'd lugged their trunks up to their rooms, had famous things pointed at by well-meaning hosts, washed up and dressed for the dinner. But Harry had never flown the Muggle way before, and he was still groggy from the flight. In the moment before everything happened he'd admitted it to Hermione, told her he still felt completely underwater.

She'd said she had a pill for that, somewhere in her ridiculous handbag, but then everything had gotten very loud.

#

It had taken a while to break Harry's resolve. It had taken a while, and three regal, angry-looking owls attached to gruff letters from Kingsley, and five extemporaneous lectures from Hermione on the Wizarding League's place in the history and stability of Wizarding Europe (in the wake of the final, deadliest Goblin Rebellion, Harry, which was still you understand only a harbinger of what might happen without such a body). It had taken all that before Harry agreed to spend a week back in his old solemn life as part of the honorary delegation. (The theme of the weekend was "Embracing Magical Modernity At History's End," with a very long subtitle that seemed to change every time Harry heard it.) Neville and Dean had told him it would be like a vacation, a wild vacation, attached to a few boring speeches, and that he was taking it too seriously. Hermione had told him how seriously he would be taken.

It had only been a year since Hogwarts had fallen down around him, but Harry'd tried to explain to Kingsley, by way of the restless leg of each regal owl, that it already felt much longer. He'd tried to tell Hermione that there was really no offseason as such for seekers in Quidditch's first division. He'd tried to tell Ernie Macmillan that he had no real use for politics, no matter how much weight his name might carry. Finally, though, he'd given the last nonplussed Ministry owl a curt note, and he'd steeled himself for Hermione's extemporaneous hug, and he'd allowed Ernie the smug self-satisfaction of believing he'd convinced the Wizard Who Won to get into politics—to "really do some good in the world," Ernie had told him, deadly serious.

#

Harry had never seen anything like the Wizarding League's reception hall. It was severe and Scandinavian-looking on the outside—the International Style, Hermione had called it—and the ceiling high over Harry's head stood in perfect opposition to Hogwarts's dusky charmed sky, a white rectangle funneled toward a vanishing point far behind the big windows that made up the far wall and showed the tops of a copse of trees and the Swiss hills in the distance. "It feels… _cold_ in here," Harry said.

"In this part of Europe, for this kind of building, ornamentation is the unforgivable curse, magic or no magic." Hermione bit her lower lip down into a little frown. "They won't say it to our face, but Wizarding Europe finds our magical community _hopelessly_ provincial."

"I reckon that's their problem, and not ours."

Hermione gave a nearly imperceptible mm-hmm and waved her ridiculous handbag at him. Her face changed, as though she remembered they weren't gossiping alone but in a room filled with a hundred dignitaries. "If we're going to play dress-up," she said, sounding a little nervous, "I suppose we should at least act the part of mature, boring diplomats, right? After you."

She was wearing a sleek, glittering dress, which she fussed with, every so often, in anxious, un-ladylike ways. "You look—fine, natural," Harry said to her, again. "I'm the one in rented Muggle eveningwear."

"I feel as if I'm playing House. United Nations House, I mean. I look—thank you, Harry—with this ridiculous handbag, and—" reaching her free hand up around her shoulders she took a final inventory of the dress's straps. "Maybe if I filled it _out_ like an adult. _Merlin_."

At that Harry tilted his gaze up over her head, into the middle distance, but she took it for boredom rather than modesty. "If I've exhausted Harry Potter's reserve of polite compliments I'm in real trouble," she said, and then quickly, before he could respond, "only it's difficult walking around in evening dress knowing I'm mostly the same species as Fleur."

Not that either of them had seen the French delegation yet. They'd been watching for them because France was as near as Britain got to having an ally in the Wizarding League—so near that Harry and Hermione, who'd been treated mostly like figureheads, had received what amounted to a briefing about them.

Kingsley had told them about the French—that is, he had told Dean about the French, and Dean had told Hermione that they were brusque and dismissive but willing to listen and worth the trouble, and then Harry that he should stand very quietly with a neutral facial expression, like he did, and fume inwardly when the topic got away from Quidditch.

Harry knew, mostly from Dean on the plane, that Kingsley and Durand, the French ambassador, had been talking for some time, since before the pureblood bailout had become necessary. Durand was old enough to know Grindelwald, and from there to know to know what Voldemort had represented, and so Kingsley had told Dean (who'd told Harry) that Durand was a silly ass and a pompous, bigoted fop, but one they could work with.

Nicolas Deniaud, his deputy, was only old enough to see Voldemort and have no idea why a dark lord, a _real_ dark lord, would respect national borders so slavishly. He was very smart, and not at all silly, and it was Dean's job to keep him away from Durand while Kingsley talked to the pompous bigoted fop they could work with.

Dean who had glided into place beside them, looking like he'd been born in tails. "Who knew it would be so easy to miss dress robes, right? But the two of you shouldn't be having nearly so much trouble as Ernie, and he's already mastered the bow-tie."

"I have, thank you," Ernie said, looking as though he imagined he looked like he'd been born in tails. "Only had to watch Dean do it once."

"It's just odd," Harry said. "Like I'm in a room full of Muggles with magic wands."

"I'm fond of it, personally," Ernie sniffed. "Wizarding Europe proves that we needn't be _beholden_ to tradition to be real wizards. Pureblood, Muggleborn—they hardly know the terms. Now I believe the dinner is about to begin."

He gave a stiff bow and walked in measured strides to their table, where Kingsley and Neville were making small talk. When he was out of earshot Dean turned back to Harry and Hermione. "I can't wait to see him use that line on the French delegation."

"And the Spanish delegation," Harry said. "And the German delegation, and the Bulgarian delegation..."

#

There was a speech by the General Secretary of the Wizarding League ("Embracing Magical Modernity at History's End: A Future Beyond States and Status") that Harry got through only by hyperfocusing on mimicking Ernie's ram-rod posture, and then a dinner he got through only by focusing on the courses he could recognize. Then, just as Harry was about to ask her if she didn't feel like getting some air, too, there was Ernie asking Hermione what she thought of the speech. There had been lots of moments like that in the last months—Harry and Hermione about to talk, except for everything else that was happening around them. But she had been pleasant, on the aeroplane, and relaxed, and that was new—or else he could no longer read her mind by watching the ways she fidgeted, pushing herself back into her thoughts. That would also be new.

"These people," Ernie said, "they're remarkable! Nearly all of them pureblood and you wouldn't even know it."

Hermione looked thoughtful for a moment. "It all sounded very fine."

"Gram doesn't trust them," Neville said.

"She'll have to," Kingsley said. "If we can't convince the rest of the League that the Death Eaters and their ilk are a problem—that the reconstruction of Wizarding Britain must be a priority—your grandmother won't have many trustworthy Britons left to gossip with."

From across the table Blaise Zabini sniffed.

Neville's hand closed tight around his glass. "Excuse me?"

Harry let his wand-hand slip beneath the tabletop. "Please, Zabini, finish your thought."

Everyone fell silent. Ernie was the only one who seemed unaffected—when the time came to talk to people who could be reasonably expected to talk back his plan had always been to conclude any outstanding speeches and drink, and he put it into action with an admirable attention to detail. A few beats passed and Harry felt, in the quiet, as though the rest of the delegations had begun inching their tables closer to Britain's and tut-tutting in the International Style. This, he supposed, was what they expected from Wizarding Britain.

Hermione put her own hands on the table and attempted, perfunctorily, to clear her throat. "Harry, please—Blaise, if you're going to say something, please just _say_ it. You're a member of the delegation."

"I'm just—not surprised to see that the Minister's reliance on scare tactics and bogeymen crosses national boundaries."

"Finally," Dean said. "Money talks."

Kingsley sighed, and that was all of it. He had clashed in this way so frequently since his appointment that his allies pitied him and his opponents had written him off; what was left was ash, and smoke, and the crackling and smoldering of old arguments and rivalries.

Forks scratched tensely over fine china a few minutes longer. Harry was testing his posture again when the party finally broke up, preparing to test Ernie's plan for surviving this sort of thing, when Ernie—looking more tipsy than drunk—asked him to hold tight for a moment while he got a very important person.

#

Twenty minutes passed before the important person arrived. Ernie was already locked in conversation with his quarry; he seemed amazed at his own ability to explain complex geopolitical issues to professional diplomats.

Harry stood up. He began to bow then had second thoughts, leaving him bent over at a slight angle, but Ernie's drinking had made him excellent camouflage for any diplomatic discomfort Harry may have felt. He turned to the table and said, one hand reaching absently for the ambassador's lapel, "For a hero—of course it was a local matter, pr'marily, born of reg-g-gional prejdis—for a hero he's really quite modest, Harry P-Potter. And Her-mynee, here. The Ambassador, Jean Durand."

Ernie was reaching for the lapel of a man in his early thirties who didn't seem at all foppish—a dark, thin functionary who smiled at them because it was the thing he was supposed to do, not because their friend was about to tip over and slide down his tux.

"Deputy Deniaud, I think," Harry said. Deniaud nodded.

Ernie's eyes widened for a moment, but—already Harry could hear him narrating the story, unaware he and Hermione had been sitting there, the next morning; "I picked up on it in a hurry, of course—kind of smoothed it out, improvised, you see." Here in the moment he smoothed the deputy's lapels over, stood up very straight, paused between them for a moment, and walked back to the bar.

"Harry Potter, of course," Deniaud said. "Ambassador Durand tells me we all owe you a debt."

"I didn't realize he was a Quidditch fan," Harry said. Deniaud didn't seem to have enough information to put the little joke together, but Hermione laughed, a little aggressively, to suggest Harry'd been right to make it.

"And you," Deniaud said. "Ms. Hermione Granger, yes?"

"Y-yes," Hermione said, and began unspooling, a little rapidly, her canned answer: "Harry did most of the work, I was mainly the li _bra_ rian, if you want to know the truth, but I—"

"Granger the Obliviator—the Lockhart matter, yes?" Deniaud's narrow face seemed whittled down roughly from a larger, more animated one; it betrayed none of the nuance he'd left out of his perfect, monotonous English. Hermione seemed to move in slow motion, waiting for a little more information.

But Hermione did excellent work; it was what Hermione did. Harry didn't know what she'd done as an Obliviator—she'd never actually told him she was one, directly—but she would be a good one. And she would impress Deniaud, because Deniaud was an authority figure. "Youngest one in ministry history," Harry said—he hadn't heard anything like that, but she usually was. Then he patted her on the back and, after a wide-eyed look he couldn't place, she began to talk.

"Yes, that was me—with a team, of course. A difficult situation."

"He wrote… I'm sorry, was supposed to have written _The Lich Woman of Lourdes_."

"Yes," Hermione said, what little conviction she had in her voice draining out. "Not a high point in Muggleborn relations, I'm afraid." Harry watched her turn, very slowly, as though she were trying to leave Deniaud secretly while she spoke. "But we're excited to learn what we can from our peers on that front. You'll have to pardon my ignorance on the subject," she said, the barest glint of the edge she used to have talking to Malfoy tempering her compliment. "I haven't heard much about French Muggleborn initiatives."

"It is easy when they are not necessary," Deniaud said, smiling. "Now Lockhart. You wonder, Mr. Potter, how I know the name, yes?"

"I'm sorry?"

"Harry," Hermione said, and then, a little louder, "Harry—"

"How I know the name of the book Ms. Granger has tried to erase, and the man."

"I'm sorry," Harry said, suddenly too confused to be angry, "I guess I've always taken as read that Gilderoy Lockhart was hard to forget—"

Hermione exhaled loudly and, in a low even voice, now, spun into another explanation, one Harry hadn't heard before. "We remember what's useful to us, deputy, with or _without_ magic, and in a situation as complex and horrific as that _author's_ it is clear to _some_ of us that—"

"I am a deputy, Ms. Granger, and a pragmatist. I do not care what Wizarding Britain does to its citizens, though I am surprised to learn you make exceptions for your Quidditch stars. Unlike," and here he tried half-heartedly to put a smile on his grave face, "unlike Ambassador Durand, it is not my concern. I find it interesting mostly as an… a lesson, yes? That you may do what you will inside your borders, and shape your memories to fit them, but here—on the outside—many people have still heard the name, even a name as silly as Gilderoy Lockhart. Please excuse me."

When Deniaud was gone Harry turned to find that Hermione was edging away from him, too.

"I can't say much about it," she said. "Talking too much about memory charms is exactly what—you know."

"What happened to the 'author,'" he said.

"That's right."

"Do you… do you like the work you do?"

Hermione's color rose as though she'd been slapped. "Merlin, Harry, we really don't talk. _Jesus_." Then she smiled, like it was a joke.

"But do you?"

"I've concluded that… that it's necessary."

"Can I get you anything to drink?" Harry asked her.

She said no, he couldn't.

#

Ambassador Durand ejected clouds of functionaries and diplomats and undersecretaries behind him as a kind of camouflaging mechanism, but it didn't work; provided he stayed out of swarming range Harry could follow the trail of suits with his eye to the most extravagant suit and the most impressively curled white hair and the oldest man hidden inside all of it. Durand had been General Secretary of the Wizarding League in the sixties, when, he remembered Hermione saying, Britain made its last sustained effort to involve itself in League efforts.

Now he was the grand old man of the Wizarding League. "If you're an eighteen-year-old future diplomat in Europe you have pictures of Durand on your wall, looking very serious with his hair slicked like—" and here Dean paused for a moment to look at Harry, and then to finish his drink. "Like James Bond. Feels good to make that reference surrounded by wizards and witches." And then a third pause to wave for another. "Sean Connery James Bond. Only the sex of it is the idea that you can start or end a war whenever you want, which I guess does it for them."

Harry was content to let Dean talk, and he did—about Durand, and about Zabini, and about Kingsley. Harry spent a few words to direct him to Nicolas Deniaud, who Dean said was a "genuine sonofabitch," and also a "real pillock," and furthermore a self-satisfied, frustratingly competent little swot.

At this Harry felt he could spare one more word: "Ernie."

"Well, but competent," Dean said, "very good at his job if you catch me in a better mood. Couldn't imagine being mad at Ernie if I wanted something from him—easy enough to just go take it.

"Deniaud will make you beg."

"Durand too," Harry said. Durand's hangers-on had parted so that from their tall stools he and Dean could see Kingsley and the ambassador leaning across a far-off table, finishing a conversation that didn't seem to have pleased either one of them.

Kingsley hadn't changed at all, but simply being the Minister of Magic had turned his skills into flaws and oddities. As an Auror he had been powerful, he'd been invisible, he'd blended into the scenery until he heard his cue; as a politician he was slippery and reactive and a bully. But nothing had changed, really. (It hadn't worked as well for Harry-he'd slipped into a different role and the press had simply changed the role for his benefit, so that being a seeker and a pitchman was as heroic as fighting a war.)

It helped Harry understand why Britain's Ernie Macmillans were so keen to recruit him—politicians in peacetime, even in an imagined peacetime, couldn't act like the resistance had. They couldn't skulk around waiting for the chance to talk to Durand; if they wanted to skulk, they had to do it _like_ Durand, hiding in plain sight inside an anonymous entourage. What made them a successful resistance made them a lousy government. And all the charismatic, the outgoing, the gladhanding members of the Order of the Phoenix had been murdered twenty years ago.

"Looks like a bad one for our boys," Dean said, following Harry's eyes. "Durand doesn't look that considerate unless he's already helped himself to everything he wanted." Kingsley had one hand wrapped around the edge of the table, his arm cocked like he was about to flip it sideways. "And Kingsley only tries looking calm when there's no chance he pulls it off."

"You sound resigned to it," Harry said. Five more words.

"Harry," Dean said. "Harry," again—then a pause while he seemed to tone down what was going to be a lecture. "I believe very strongly in the idea of what we're doing, same as I ever did. I want to do everything I can to make it work. But there's nothing on the table here I feel like giving _everything_ for. Spend another five hours trying to bail your chasers out or grab the Snitch and take a gentleman's loss. Not worth—I've been drinking and you know full well I'm trying not to say dying for."

"Yes," Harry said. From where they sat Kingsley seemed pitiable, all twisted up like he was, but small—small and mute and unimportant compared to drinking and letting Dean talk.

"I watched Zabini put him up a tree and keep him there for months," Dean said. "Watching the Distinguished Ambassador box his ears is a pleasure, relatively speaking. It's nice watching it with a civilian, as well, if I'm honest."

It was nice watching it with Dean—that was the strange thing, the thing Harry's subconscious must have been keeping him from thinking about each time he'd come up with a new reason to reject Kingsley's invitation. None of it mattered, so long as they were alive and accounted for and there was someplace to sit and talk about the slow apocalypse.

There was Dean. There was Kingsley. Ernie was trailing in the wake, looking for the real Durand, and Neville was drinking toasts with countries Harry couldn't identify at a glance. Hermione was—he wasn't sure where—but after that he'd have accounted for everyone in the room whose existence mattered, and that would be that. He nodded to Dean, who nodded back. Then he slipped off the stool and walked, slowly, until he'd judged he had been in a position to see every part of the great ballroom over and around strangers' heads.

And once he saw Hermione he realized he could have guessed where she'd been, if he'd wanted to—having been dressed down by one authority figure, and with nowhere to hide, she'd escalated her case and found a higher authority. He'd only wanted to see her—to complete his inventory and go to bed—but then he'd seen the man she was talking with.

General Secretary Goddard looked exactly like Deniaud and completely different—like one of those masks whose expressions change depending on how the light hits it. He was older, and somehow even slimmer, but his hatchet face was animated with pleasant concern; he'd already drawn Hermione out of herself and back into a lecture.

They were across the hall from Harry. Standing against a wall he'd finally seen them over the heads of seated dignitaries—Hermione making sharp, self-conscious gestures, Goddard nodding and with one hand around a drink—but while he walked toward them they came in and out of view, obscured by passing groups.

Harry wove and ducked his way across the center of the hall until he could hear Hermione's voice. She was giving a variation on a speech Harry recognized from their first couple of months outside Hogwarts, when she was traveling to any dinner club, fraternal organization, or church group who would have her say a few words as a brilliant hero with an unlimited future. (One night that October, hearing Ron's side of a furious and sad phone call after back-to-back-to-back speeches on the road, Harry had asked her in all innocence why she was doing them. She'd turned her head to one side, made a low, impressed-sounding whistle, left the pub where they were talking, and canceled every last one she had scheduled, and then she'd never spoken to anyone about them again.)

Harry hadn't heard her stump speech since then—he hadn't even heard first-hand about her abrupt retirement—and soon after they began to see less and less of each other. But now she was performing again and Goddard at least gave the impression of being taken with the force of her argument. She was giving the "hybrid vigor" speech, about Muggleborn wizards and pureblood wizards competing and cooperating to build a society stronger than either could manage alone, and leavening it with Wizarding League comparisons Harry was sure she'd at least _like_ to believe.

"… And reintegrating Britain inside Wizarding Europe," she was saying when he could hear her again. "I have to say I'm excited about that same kind of hybridity. Sir."

"We've always been results-oriented," Goddard said. "The Wizarding League was founded on an idea, and an image of a certain kind of unity in Wizarding Europe, and we have a mandate to move toward it. Of course we're pleased to see a Britain that is willing to move with us."

Hermione frowned at this—her thinking frown—and Harry picked up his pace and moved to interrupt. Before the war she would frown and think as long as it took and reemerge with her answer, supremely confident, but the postwar Hermione who had hidden behind speeches as long as she could would frown and then start, as though she'd been jolted awake by an intruder, and begin to ramble, the thinking half-done.

Harry allowed himself to be introduced to Goddard, and listened to Hermione's half-thought and anxious complaints about Goddard's listening while they walked, and then, when they were finally lost among Eastern European delegates with forceful voices, whispered directions until she saw Kingsley and Durand huddled in conversation.

"We should show Dean," she said, in command of her voice again. She'd taken his arm and was just leaning against him to get a clear view of the hall where they spoke.

"I did," Harry said.

"Oh," she said, "yes."

"But I wanted you to—"

Harry felt her shove off against him and walk in the direction of the huddle; he followed after.

Pause. Pause. And then, tossing sentences over her shoulder: "You wonder too, right? What we gain from propping our government up compared to one of the garden-variety Bad Purebloods would do?"

It seemed like a rhetorical question so he nodded, still a step behind her.

"And why—being a Muggleborn is certainly less remarked-upon, here," Hermione said, "but not less alienating." Finally she turned to face Harry. "Am I just losing it? Was I expecting something completely ridiculous, after everything?"

"No," Harry said. "And maybe."

But when she turned again Kingsley was gone and Durand had directed his coma of functionaries into a different orbit. She stood in the middle of the room, for a moment, looking like she was going to cry, and then she began to walk again, and Harry followed her gratefully out to the balcony, beyond the wide windows at the far wall.

"I felt like I was cooking in there," Hermione said, when they got outside. It was dark on the balcony save for three massive, unadorned columns, which rose thirty feet into the night to meet the roof and glowed a pristine white by some indeterminate combination of moonlight and enchantments. There were stars out like Harry hadn't seen in six months of hazy London evenings, after practices and during matches, and it was just cold enough that he felt the heat rising up from under his stiff collar and radiating off his cheeks.

"Whatever the conference's findings on British Muggleborn reconciliation are, I think they'd better enact them quickly, before Dean's brought up under the old statutes for murdering Zabini."

"Right."

Harry had been trying for something light but Hermione turned away, out toward the evergreens that just reached up to brush against the balcony. It occurred to him, finally, that she'd gotten more anxious, somehow, in the months they'd been apart; he realized she'd stopped holding eye contact. "Did I—"

"You don't hate me for nagging you about coming—"

"No, of course not. I might hate Kingsley for nagging Zabini about coming, but a view like this is worth leaving London for, on occasion. And I haven't had a real day off since I signed, if you want to know the truth."

"Good."

They turned away from the luminous columns toward the party inside. "Can't say much for all this, though. This feels like the wrong path, somehow, not that I know what the right path would be."

"I'm not a eurosceptic, exactly, but—you're right, I think. I don't like seeing Kingsley this way. He's acting powerless, whether he's powerless or not."

"Budget deficits on one side and these—these people on the other," Harry said. "And here Zabini isn't the only one who thinks he's an out-of-touch… er, witch-hunter, I guess it still is. A hundred Zabinis to put up with, all of them richer and less interested in our little problems."

"Different all over again," Hermione said.

"Exactly. Took me years, but I'd finally got used to the way society worked—to the purebloods and half-bloods and the, the mudbloods. Now Ernie's happy to tell me that that's only important in Britain—that we spent our whole lives fighting those problems while they solved them over tea at one of these things a hundred years ago."

"Harry, don't—"

It was as though she could see him thinking about Remus, and Sirius, and Fred, and—and he exhaled before he went on. "It was worth it, Hermione, you've told me enough times by now. It's not that. But what's Britain worth if that's what it cost to get some backwater out of the dark ages? Part of me wishes I were Zabini, and none of this mattered anyway compared to galleons and ancestry."

Hermione took two halting steps forward and patted him lightly on the shoulder. When the words came it was all at once: "I can assure you that—that no part of anybody else at our table wishes you were Zabini." They stood there. Then she smiled, and then she giggled, and before Harry could turn on her she said, "Ernie might be right about your future in politics, you know." Harry tried to shrug off her hand and turned around, his eyes wide. "It was a lovely speech! Honest, I know, and lovely. But it was."

Harry pantomimed a noose tightening around his neck. "You're going to make me resign right over the edge of this balcony, Hermione."

From the edge of the ballroom, backlit by a more raucous party than Harry remembered leaving, Neville began clapping slowly. "It really was'nspiring, Harry."

Harry turned as if summoned. "Oh—you too?"

"Swore up'n'down I'd keep an eye on you," Neville said in a half-yell, sounding suddenly very drunk. "Up'n down'I did on Ginny's honor. 'Swhat I'm doing."

Hermione took her hand from Harry's shoulder and, with her eyes down, said, " _Honestly_ , Neville—I don't know what you're—" much too quietly for Neville to hear.

Neville went on, completely unfazed. "Tol' me last month she's worried about"—and here he made a wildly exaggerated hourglass shape with his hands—"up on the mountains and on—in town, you know. Alpine vixens, she called 'em. 'Scontinental women for you, she said, not to be trusted. Anyway, Ernie's looking f'two of you. Wants to show you off to Am-m-bassador Durand. Char-r-ming fellow, the ambassador."

"Thank you, Neville!" Harry yelled after him.

Hermione had composed herself during Neville's evocative gesturing. "I suspect Ernie might have the right one, this time. Well—we mustn't keep the ambassador waiting."

"Neville clearly didn't wait." They laughed and then it was quiet again.

"You don't mind that I and the Weasleys are still—"

Hermione shook her head until he stopped talking. "They're your family, Harry, of course not. And Gin. God, I'd be terrible if I did."

"Good. When everything happened to them I knew I—but then, you—"

"I wouldn't make you choose, Harry. Not that I _could_ , even, but I—I wouldn't make you."

They didn't talk for a while.

"I'm cold," Hermione said.

"Sure," Harry said. "Yeah. Let's go in and see what Ernie's amazed about now."

#

From the moment they had arrived there'd been something not right about everything Harry had seen. But he couldn't piece it together. He couldn't begin to articulate it to Neville, let alone Kingsley; his head was still swimming from the flight. He'd agreed to act as a figurehead, and nobody cared who he was; he'd wanted to lose himself on vacation, and he was stuck in sober conversations with French delegates; he'd hoped to be friendly with Hermione again and every light, fun conversation they had seemed to tap a new vein of discomfort and concealment.

He wanted to get drunk. He had anonymity, and an open bar, and nobody sober to talk to, and no press skulking in alleyways, and he wanted to drink until he couldn't tell what was airsickness and what was regular, healthy forgetting-sickness.

But now he and Hermione were having a light and fun conversation about his swimming head. And so all he said to Hermione when she asked if he was okay was: "To be honest, you still sound completely underwater to me. The Quidditch tabloids would ruin me if they knew about this, I imagine. 'The Boy Who Lived With Sensitive Ears.'" His head was throbbing between his sensitive ears, but he knew how Hermione would react to that.

"You can count on my discretion, of course," Hermione said, tipping an invisible hat.

"You see, Hermione? Why, even Ernie here sounds completely underwater to me."

"Oh—I have a pill for that!" Against Harry's protestations she began digging around in her ridiculous handbag. "It's—I always used to get that, and I'd cry and sulk the first night of all our holidays. Not that you're sulking, I mean—"

Harry grinned at Hermione, watched her simultaneously overreact and realize she was overreacting like she always had. Then it got very loud, and all at once the small noises the professional seeker should have caught, the little shifts in mood and tone that should have set him on edge, fell into place behind the present moment.

Someone was coming in over the lovely balcony.

Someone was crashing through the severe doors.

The Death Eaters appeared at either end of the party, and as tables crashed to the ground and screams echoed in the sterile white room and whole delegations pushed toward and through the double doors to all the suites Harry knew what was wrong. Kingsley had vanished, the ambassador was calling out to his countrymen in martial French, and in the moment before Harry thought he might finally understand what was happening Ernie Macmillan and Neville Longbottom fell dead beside him.

#

The hall was filled with smoke, and then screaming, and then the sound of spells, spells cast in strangled shouts. The clatter of the big round tables, turned over and rolling.

The Death Eaters had come up over the balcony and through the big double doors at the other end. They'd fired wildly, toward the British delegation and elsewhere, and before anyone had understood what was happening Neville and Ernie lay dead on the floor.

Harry thought he had seen some others fall in his peripheral vision. That's the last thing he remembers thinking when he's thinking again, in the middle of the hall. The tables all seem turned to face him, in a loose, expectant circle. He's breathing heavily, and until the world snaps back into place around him that's all he can hear. But now he can hear the crying, and the chatter, and the After Them! from the general secretary's honor guard.

In front of him lies a Death Eater cut to ribbons, bleeding from ragged wounds. Sectumsempra. From over the tables delegations who had only heard his name before this afternoon are staring at the body, and the destruction, and then back at the wizard in the middle of it, finally.

Harry Potter, the professional Quidditch player and regional hero; the honorary delegate.

#

 _A note: The remainder of this story occurs in real time. It is now a little after 10 PM on the night of the purification of Wizarding Britain._


	2. 10 PM: Over the Long Flat Roof

When his head stops swimming Harry is swarmed by the sound of things being kept from him—shuffling and whispering and the nervous determined gathering-up of courage. The tables in the ballroom are overturned and rotated in a tight circle, as if he's about to address them, but already most of the makeshift bunkers are silent.

First he notices that he is not alone—there is a group, huddled behind him in harried conversation. Sort it, separate it: There's Dean's strangled whisper, that's Hermione taking oral notes and studying them all at once, and finally there is Zabini, sounding more put out than worried or furious, saying, "We have no hand to play, Potter, and no one has any reason to take our bet."

Even Zabini, then, recognizes Harry is in front—the tables are arrayed around or against him—but before he can ask Zabini or Hermione or Dean why they are alone he sees they aren't.

Dean sees it, first, and then he sees Dean, sprinting with his wand out toward a black flash at one end of the ballroom. Something has ducked into a hallway and they are chasing it.

Harry can only assume it took him so long to notice the footsteps because the League Hall feels, in every particular, like a place footsteps ought to be inaudible. Moments ago, when they were still guests—when they were being led by smiling functionaries to every place Hermione and Ernie might reasonably ooh and ahh and remember the relevant section in their guidebook—the League Hall had been a city, a clean, well-lighted Diagon Alley. As night fell the usual complement of ambassadors and staffers had left, but in lieu of house elves the honorary diplomats' talking and dining and dancing had been attended by great crowds of wizard custodians.

It occurred to Harry, watching quiet wizards and witches orbit trays of hors d'oeuvre around the great round tables, that in Wizarding Britain he knew almost no wage-earners—proprietors and professionals and bureaucrats, countless bureaucrats, but nobody like his Uncle Vernon who received a pay packet and hoped someday to rise to middle-middle-manager of the firm. In the League Hall they were everywhere—Harry couldn't imagine what they all did, and Hermione didn't seem to know either, and Ernie had looked at him as though it was a little gauche to ask—and now all of them gone. And their absence, in what suddenly seemed like the ruins of the League Hall, could send Dean chasing after footfalls in the wide corridors of an office tower.

A part of Harry spins back up when Dean gives chase, and he silences their footsteps before Zabini can roll his eyes at Dean for forgetting. For what feels like a long time, now, but minutes ago had felt like no time at all, Harry has walled off all the parts of him that aren't useful for Quidditch or keeping his friends out of politics. But there's no rust once his wand is out.

Hermione nods to get his attention, and he flinches. There's no rust with the magic. He turns again, slowly and smoothly this time, back to Hermione, and keeps his eyes on hers. But she is only reminding him to muffle their voices, and her eyes are gone before he can work reassurance into his face.

They can move faster now, or Harry can—Dean is keeping behind Zabini, and Hermione is panting behind them both. But Harry has never felt better, physically, and he is not worried about what he'll find, and he chases the footsteps through the halls and around corners. As they get deeper the offices behind get smaller and the severe wooden doors crowd together until they may as well be sprinting through a hotel. Then the doors thin out and vanish entirely and they're in an annex, or something like it—an auxiliary space, someplace they aren't supposed to be—when he sees the flash of a black cloak and yells from some walled-off part of his mind in a voice that he does not recognize.

He slides in his brand-new shoes across the polished floor and around the corner as a door slams shut. Dean is at his back as he begins to swish his wand, and then there's Hermione's "Wait!" echoing around the corner. When they're all three in front of the door he asks, "Where's Zabini?"

There's murder in Dean's eyes but before he can get it onto his lips Hermione is in front of them both, saying "Alohamora" in full voice and slipping through the door and saying, "Harry! It's—"

It's a remnant of the waitstaff, huddled round a dirty floo. They're surrounded by desks and broken chairs and the scattered pieces of old offices. It's dark except for a few wands and there's no fire. Harry's head is pounding again and he thinks maybe it's from of all the running until he realizes it isn't. "Hermione, you could've been—" he says.

But Hermione is still in front of him, her wand at her side. She looks at the one who is trying to start the floo and bites her lip and says, finally, "S-sie—sie sind Kellner hier?"

"J-ja."

"Bist du in Ordnung?"

"Einer von uns fehlt."

"A-all of us could have been killed," Harry says, and he's surprised at first to hear himself echoing among the tabletops and blackboards. "All of us!"

Hermione turns but she's unreadable.

"You'll remember we're nasty, simple wizards in Britain," he says, "and there's a way to do this so that we _won't_ be— _legilimens_." The man at the floo falls to a knee, as though he's stood up too fast, and in a moment it's over.

"I'm correct, then?" Hermione says. Her voice does not echo among the tabletops and blackboards.

"Nothing the Ministry's finest young Obliviator hasn't seen already, I'm sure," Harry says.

"You're right."

"This man did not see any Death Eaters."

In loud, stilted English Dean tells them all to be safe and stay there until help arrives, and then he pulls Harry out the door. "Zabini," Dean says. "Zabini was with us and then he was not. Does this concern you?" When the door is shut Harry casts another silencing charm and then he hits it, once, as hard as he can.

#

Now Harry and Dean are trying doors in the annex. A few of them hold little groups of support staff, none of them nursing anything worse than a burn or a strain, and each time they see a group Dean yells again about waiting for help to arrive and locks the door tighter than he found it.

"Who is help?" Harry asks, back in the corridor.

"WIZENF." Hermione is sitting with her back to the opposite wall, thinking. "Wizarding Enforcement. We're in international territory; they can make arrests."

"You'd sooner find an Auror who cares to write the Knight Bus a speeding ticket," Dean says.

"Yes."

"We could open every door in this hallway," Harry says, "and find five or ten Wizarding League employees in it, and we still wouldn't account for half the staff we saw ten minutes ago."

"This is a blind alley," Dean says, suddenly, slamming the last door he tries. "If we're lucky it's the kind we invented for ourselves, and not the kind somebody leads you down. Our suite is unguarded and Zabini is missing." And Dean runs.

Harry runs, too, but his head is swimming so that he doesn't think to slow down and he is across the ballroom—the empty and chaotic ballroom, just as they left it—and up to the delegates' suites on the mezzanine and checking doors when he hears Dean (hard footfalls every other step) and then, some time later, Hermione (clattering heels that can't keep time) on the stairwell.

For a moment Dean knocks, and shouts, and threatens at the door of every honorary diplomat in Wizarding Europe. Then he opens the door to their own suite and slams it shut.

The suites on the mezzanine are newer than the rest of the building—not the sterile whites and flat colors of the ballroom but the polished architecture and raw materials of the five-star Muggle hotel on the back of the in-flight magazine. A few hours ago the British suite was self-consciously spotless; now it has the abandoned, unsettling feeling of a room whose do-not-disturb placard has hung from a locked door one day too long. Dean is reaching for the switch when he realizes the light is on.

"Muggles waste so much electricity this way," Dean says. His hand is on his wand.

"Makes me feel like my uncle's about to reach for his belt," Harry says. Harry's hand is in his jacket when Hermione emerges from the kitchen. She's transfigured her heels into flats but is otherwise the same way she left them a few minutes earlier—ill-at-ease in her evening-wear, anxious, frustrated that she's insufficiently prepared to raise her hand and answer the question. "You'll never guess where I've been," she says, forcing her shoulders back and her eyes open halfway through, when she realizes she's trying to sound breezy.

Harry won't.

She slouches again. "The lift."

Harry is in Zabini's room, trying to open his trunk.

"This is where Ron would make a joke," Dean says, and Hermione sounds grateful when she laughs.

And then she says, in a low round voice, " _Oi_ , wouldn't hurt you to huff the stairs like we did." Then as herself again, still looking a little adrift: "It's a Muggle service lift."

"That seems like the kind of thing you'd be proud of them for, in another life," Dean says.

Hermione sounds very distant to Harry when she agrees, but her voice picks up when she has more of her report to recite. "It's an advantage for us. The Death Eaters won't use them. Honestly, I'm not sure the Wizarding League uses them—the one I tried made an awful noise on the way up, and there was no sign it'd been inspected."

"But somebody could have used it to get in here," Dean says.

"Yes. Or anywhere they weren't wanted. I suppose the Death Eaters could be more flexible on this sort of thing than they used to be."

"That's just about the whole point of being a Death Eater, though, isn't it—" then the lid of Zabini's trunk splits down the middle, where Harry's wand was, and makes a loud hissing noise, and Dean says, "— _Merlin_ , Harry, you have a warrant for that?"

"Harry," Hermione says, sounding frazzled. "Now he'll—but of course he'll _know_ we suspect him because he's Blaise Zabini, so that doesn't make a— _ignore_ me." She walks in sync to the stammering gait of her thoughts back to the door. "We shouldn't have left the ballroom unattended. I'm going to—" abruptly, she opens the door and slams it shut behind her.

"I know you and Ron are close," Dean says, "and she wasn't exactly… but _Merlin_ , man—"

"Dean."

"Now, of all times," Dean says, "especially now. I don't know how much you two talk, but I know you heard about the Lockhart case. You think Obliviators usually get into that kind of scrape, Harry? I guess you thought a year ago Hermione was the type to become an Obliviator?"

"We're all different from a year ago," Harry says.

"I figure—charitably, Harry—you don't see it. The rest of us, we've got an advantage, because we watched you try to kill yourself for years and years."

" _Dean_."

"But hey, you made it! You have to understand we were happier about it than you, at the time. Only took two defective killing curses, Dumbledore constructing his own clockwork assassination, an unconscionable amount of luck, and—yes, and also Ron and Hermione refusing to let you go through with it, every single day, for seven years. Now I believe Ron to be a fine and noble bloke when he wants, but he's got plenty on his own plate and justifiably washed his hands of this one, so—"

"Not Ron, Dean—not the Weasleys. Don't you _dare_."

"I'll be sad about the Weasleys if I bloody well want to be, you _miserable_ little—you might remember that those of us who work with Arthur are responsible for getting him to stop staring at an empty inbox and go home of a quarter to midnight.

"But fine, Harry. No Weasleys. Only this: I know you aren't stupid enough to think Hermione became an Obliviator on account of how happy she is, or that she has begun modifying memories in ways that the Ministry hasn't even thought to regulate yet because it's the relaxing creative outlet she's always needed. Just think about what Obliviators _do_ , Harry. They make people forget, and they remember. They take something a hundred people saw and they carry it by themselves, so alone that those same hundred people would think they were crazy if they repeated it."

"I don't know why she would," Harry says. The rancor has drained out of his voice, but there's no sympathy in it either.

"I think you both have taken very sad, very predictable, very different steps to try to wipe yourselves out of existence. And I'd be happy to let you and Hermione go on doing it, Harry, because I'm your friend and I want you to be happy. It's just that _I_ , personally, would like to live. I'd like to find Kingsley, too, and I'd like to make sure the government doesn't fall in the morning, but since I can't count on you to care about Kingsley or the government, please stop obliterating yourself long enough to help me stay alive for one night."

"All right," Harry says. And he lightens. He says, "I won't do it for you, exactly, but I'd like one of us to outlive Zabini."

#

From across the ballroom, unengaged by Hermione, the General Secretary of the Wizarding League looks like every Muggle clerk who has ever handed Harry official paperwork, or an ad in the _Times_ for rented formalwear.

He is already walking in no particular hurry toward the mezzanine stairs when Harry and Dean finish descending them. He doesn't seem surprised, or alarmed, or anything at all to see them, but when he gets close enough to talk in a quiet, controlled voice he says, not without sympathy, "Good evening, Mr. Potter."

"Good evening, Secretary Goddard," Dean says.

Harry squints and the thin, precise face finally resolves, just below his own eye-level.

"You have much to grieve, I'm sure," Goddard says. "But I hope you will accompany me to my quarters—only for a moment."

Dean nods, and Goddard taps the place at his lapel where his wand must be. A stylized League Hall appears in front of him—in thick outlines and primary colors, like a modernist map of the Underground—and he taps the green line, and suddenly they are in an office that looks like the ballroom in miniature, gleaming white with dark wood trim. Dean realizes he is already sitting down.

Goddard summons one more chair (or the room does, Harry still can't quite follow) and nods, and takes his own seat.

Then Harry goes under again—voluntarily, not like before. He can hear Dean and Goddard talking, and he can see a ghostly image of the secretary reflected in the massive window behind them, floating over the treeline. But he can think, only, of the bodies—Neville's and Ernie's and Kingsley's, wherever it is.

Some time passes, or doesn't, until something in Goddard's smooth voice catches against Harry—a wrapping-up tone—and the words separate themselves again.

"… sincere promise that Wizarding Enforcement will keep you apprised just as they keep me apprised."

And suddenly Dean Thomas sounds like Kingsley Shacklebolt's young deputy, and not Harry's roommate. "If I can be candid for a moment, Secretary Goddard, what happens in the next—" he looks at his watch "—the next seven hours will determine the survival of the British government. This is not a matter for WIZENF."

"If you consult our charter, Mr. Thomas, you'll see that the assasination of diplomats from _multiple_ nations at a Wizarding League conference is categorically a matter for WIZENF." Nothing in Goddard's voice changes and Harry feels another pang of sympathetic embarrassment for Kingsley. "But I understand that Britain believes very little to be a matter for the Wizarding League charter."

Dean is better than Kingsley but there's still labor in his voice, and in the pause he takes before responding. "I am not here to be patronized, Secretary Goddard. But I understand your position, as well. The surviving members of the British delegation have no interest in interfering with WIZENF's investigation. But it is our intention to find the Minister of Magic and the people who have taken him."

"You certainly are not," Goddard says, finally. "Here to be patronized, that is. Mr. Thomas, Mr. Potter: I think you will find the other affected delegations lacking in sympathy for Minister Shacklebolt. But I am only interested in League business. If your intentions and mine do not come into conflict—if, for a time, they compliment each other—it is unlikely you will hear from me before sunrise. If you require more help of—of that nature—before then, you will see that I am capable of offering it."

Harry and Dean stand up; the secretary shakes their hands. Before they can ask how to see themselves out the map is up again, and Goddard has pressed the white rectangle at the center of it, and they are in the ballroom.

#

"I know where they've all gone," Hermione shouts. She's crouched at a wall by the stage at the center of the room when they appear, running her wand across an access panel recessed into the stage steps. But she jogs forward to meet them and Harry is struck again by how naturally unathletic she is, how badly suited she was for all the running and diving and killing they did. Her thin arms and her thin legs don't quite sync up when she runs. But she reaches them, breathing hard, with something to explain written on her voice. "The delegations," she pants.

"They've gone away," Dean says. "I hope you can tell us more than that."

"The Flooresce!" Zabini yells.

"They took the—" Hermione says. She takes a breath and looks at Zabini for exactly as long as is necessary to acknowledge him, and when she turns back to Dean her face is again wiped clean of intent.

Zabini is standing on the stage, overlooking the place Hermione had been. He hops down and walks toward them, his hands empty and swinging.

Harry looks at Zabini exactly as long as is necessary.

"They took the Flooresce," Zabini says. "Madam Pince did you a real disservice restricting the stacks to century-old books, Granger."

"It's the track lights in the room, I think," Hermione says. "The access panel," and she waves to where a thin steel door sits propped against the steps, "has Muggle breakers for everything else, all of them tripped, and no circuit at all for those lights. You put your hand against it and leap through, I think. H-how long have you been—"

Zabini turns to Dean and Harry. "I saw one of us walking unattended through an active Death Eater ambush and decided to keep an eye out. I'm sure any of you would do the same for me."

Harry feels Zabini's eyes on him but it is easy now to keep his face a pleasant blank—the professional Quidditch player in the _Prophet_ , the paid spokesperson for Sam's Extra-Safe Spellgard.

"I agree," Dean finally says, reaching the same register he struggled to for Goddard, "that it would be unsafe to let you walk alone through an active Death Eater ambush. I suppose our Flooresce doesn't work, Hermione?"

"I flipped all the switches I could see, and I tried all the incantations I knew. Someone is keeping us here."

"Or Shacklebolt closed the door behind him."

"Here it is!" Dean says. "Finally! Tell me how Kingsley Shacklebolt murdered our friends and put every head of state in Wizarding Europe at risk because he doesn't have the votes to push Gringotts."

Harry is looking past them all, at the access panel. " _Dean_ ," Hermione tries.

But Dean's wand is out. "Tell me!"

Zabini is looking hard at Dean, now. His wand is in his jacket and he makes no show of reaching for it. "Let me tell you something you don't seem to know already, instead," Zabini says. "About yourselves, if you'll forgive the presumption. None of you has _ever_ been anything but right, in your own eyes and in the eyes of the winners. The good people, I mean." Hermione looks about to protest—her eyes widen, her mouth opens—and without turning to her he says, "Potter has felt _guilty_. I'm sure he has felt _conflicted_. But he has never felt _wrong_.

"I'm trying to tell you I understand. It's not Potter's fault. Now, I am the Boy Who Lived. First I'm told I'm a wizard, not just a wizard but a famous hero. I'm told I am _the only one_ who can defeat the Dark Lord, and that any means of doing so is justified. I grow stronger and I make friends and finally I do win, and the Dark Lord is dead. Everything I've been told I must do is met with rapturous applause by all the people I've ever loved, and denigrated by a few known murderers, and bigots, and bad people."

"And Blaise Zabini, the rich and handsome disinterested observer," Hermione spits.

"Hermione," Harry says, and she shrinks backward.

"My apologies," Zabini says, "that must have sounded glib. But now I, the Boy Who Lived, must spend the rest of my life in a world where there is no prophecy and my side has already won, and the time has come to split up the right side of history, where I've always been standing."

Dean has his wand at Zabini's chest. "Please, finish your story. A point-of-view shift might be helpful."

"I am sure Kingsley Shacklebolt seems unimpeachable. And he might be. But I have some advice, from the losing side: Voldemort and Grindelwald _also_ represented the arc of progress, the self-declared heroes of the story. Grindelwald, especially… I can hazard a guess at what Dumbledore showed you, Potter, and for once I'm glad he did. He showed you a talented, right-thinking wizard who said: 'I know this isn't _quite_ what we stand for, but the ends will justify it.'

"So you're Kingsley Shacklebolt. You've already asked a disgusting and amoral—but handsome and disinterested—pureblood to float your government through some lean times. You do it because you know you'll still be able to wipe out his kind eventually. Why not go just—a little—further? If it will all be right in the end?"

Dean is breathing like he's run up a flight of stairs, and his wand trembles and flexes on a buttonhole over Zabini's heart. Hermione's eyes are closed.

Harry says, "You're right about me, and about Dumbledore. There's no way out of this sort of—cycle. You get on where you're needed and you get off before someone needs to destroy you. I think you're wrong about Kingsley, but if we kill you now—"

"Merlin Harry you _would_ be dumb enough to let him into your head."

"He's told you a story where the moral is very conveniently 'You'll become Grindelwald if you kill Blaise Zabini for expediency's sake,'" Hermione says, her voice a low groan. "B-but he's right," she finishes, even lower.

Dean takes one step back from Zabini, still brandishing his wand. " _Point us_ ," he says. He traces the length of Zabini's jacket pocket and then pulls his wand roughly away from Zabini's chest, as though from a magnet. When Dean replaces it inside his own jacket the tip of the wand is visible through one narrow lapel, pointing at Zabini's. "We are looking for Death Eaters," Dean says. "Where will we find you when we've finished?"

"When WIZENF arrives, I will relay your concerns and mine. Meanwhile, I will be waiting," Zabini says, "in my quarters. As Granger deduced—admirably, coming as she did from a position of total ignorance—the Flooresce is out.

"But if you're looking for Death Eaters, perhaps I can start you off in the right place. Thomas, Potter—would you mind joining me on the balcony for a moment? I believe Granger has some more electrical work to do."

Dean nods at Hermione. "Watch the doors," he says, and she nods yes.

The air on the balcony is warmed, a little, by the glowing columns, but a cold wind has picked up and the trees rustle at a whisper beneath Zabini's voice.

"I thought I'd ask after the general secretary without Granger present, so that I might actually hear from Potter about it."

Dean repeats what he told Goddard; after he's done Harry adds, "If killing a Death Eater does not interfere with WIZENF's investigation I understand we might be able to forego the trial."

"You two are asking me to believe quite a lot," Zabini says. "That Goddard believes there were Death Eaters, for one."

"I guess he knows one when he sees it."

"For another, that Potter wasn't worried about Granger an hour after what he believes to have been a Death Eater ambush." Harry isn't sure what Zabini is insinuating—he's not sure Zabini knows—but the muscles go tense in his face. "Maybe you took the break-up worse than Weasley did, or maybe you're as skeptical of all this as I am."

"Hermione can take care of herself," is what Harry says. He can see her inside the ballroom, framed by the columns—rocking back and forth on her feet, worrying the little silver cross on her neck, slumping her bare shoulders.

"I've known Death Eaters, Potter," Zabini says. "I take no pleasure in telling you this: They would kill Hermione Granger a hundred times before they took fifteen seconds to wind McMillan up about his lisp."

"She's made it more than clear that she's capable of—"

"But that's not why I'm skeptical. I'm skeptical because it's been an hour and we don't know where Shacklebolt has gone."

"Probably a sick owl," Dean says, moving forward until he's looking down his nose at Zabini, "or else he hasn't got any ink! Or else—"

"I am the Death Eaters," Zabini says. "I have just kidnapped the Minister of Magic. I celebrate, in accordance with Death Eater tradition, by keeping the whole thing to myself."

"You've _killed_ him," Harry says, and then he says nothing.

"The _Death Eaters_ ," Zabini says, "have killed him. I, the Death Eaters, celebrate, in accordance with Death Eater tradition, by staking out the moral high ground and choosing not to extract a ransom from a hostile and nigh-on-bankrupt government before his body is discovered."

Hermione would see the flaw in his reasoning, Harry thinks; Ron would press the issue until it broke. But Harry by himself can only see what they would have done; he can't do it.

"As always," Dean says, "you've demonstrated an uncanny grasp of Death Eater psychology. But what have we got right now, in front of us? We've got a Death Eater on the floor of the Wizarding League and a missing person."

"And no body," Zabini says. "And no—look up, Thomas. You too, Potter. I came out here to not show you something. So tell me what you don't see."

And over the tops of the evergreens, and over the long flat roof of the League Hall—under the stars and the full moon—there is no Dark Mark.


End file.
